An Interview with Author Connie Berry

Connie Berry has a brand-new book out entitled The Shadow of Memory, and we here at NTG were able to speak with Connie about her new novel and creative writing in general!

Nerds That Geek: What is it that inspired the creation of The Shadow of Memory?

Connie Berry: Some plots are pure fiction, created out of whole cloth in the author’s imagination. Others, like The Shadow of Memory, are inspired by real-life events. My first inspiration was a 2002 episode of “This American Life” with Ira Glass. The show, “House on Loon Lake,” told the story of several young boys in the nineteen seventies who broke into a mysterious abandoned house in New Hampshire. What fascinated me was the idea of a time capsule—a house, containing the furniture and personal effects of a family, left exactly as they had been in the past. Why was the house abandoned? What had happened to the people who lived there?

My second inspiration came from Bill Bryson’s very funny book, The Road to Little Dribbling, where he talks about taking a job as an orderly in a mental hospital organized around a novel theory in the treatment of mental illness. That sent me on a deep dive into Victorian mental hospitals. I learned that a number of private institutions were built in the mid- to late-nineteenth century for fee-paying patients among the British middle classes. With the advent of the National Health Service, these private hospitals couldn’t complete. But the buildings were exceptionally beautiful, so many of them have been repurposed, some into luxury housing.

The final inspiration for The Shadow of Memory came from a news article I read about a Frans Hals painting, “Portrait of a Gentleman,” sold by Sotheby’s auction house in London to an American dealer for ten million dollars. With the help of modern technology, the painting was subsequently proven to be a forgery. At least four other “old masters” have been linked to the same (very talented) forger, and many more may be hanging in museums and private collections.

These three threads came together for me in an interesting way—and I hope interesting for readers.

NTG: What are you most excited for your readers to experience in this new book?

Connie Berry: First, I hope readers enjoy the three-layered mystery—the puzzle of a fifteenth-century painting attributed to Jan Van Eyck (is it what it appears to be?), a pair of sixty-year-old deaths which may or may not have been murder, and the deaths of three pensioners today, seemingly natural and unrelated until Kate finds the dark secret that ties them together.

NTG: Now that you are four books into the series, how much more story do you envision is left to tell in this saga?

Connie Berry: I don’t have an end point in mind. After all, who would have guessed that the seven books in Caroline Graham’s Midsomer series have now stretched to more than 128 television episodes. Ms. Graham reportedly “lost interest” in the series and decided to focus on screenplays instead, but the viewing public isn’t ready to let the series go. How many murders can take place in one small English county? As many as you like, apparently. Kate’s friend and landlady, Vivian Bunn, once remarked that rural Suffolk had no serious crime problem until Kate arrived. True. In each of the Kate books, I highlight one or more of the peripheral cast of characters, and there are plenty left to focus on. What if a diner dies in the middle of a meal at the Three Magpies gastropub and the police find poison in the sauce? Will the proprietors, Jayne and Gavin Collier, be charged? What if the newly married rector of St. Æthelric’s Church is accused of stabbing his elderly organist because she refused to play the hymns he requested?

And there’s also Kate herself. If she and DI Tom Mallory manage to tie the knot, what stresses will marriage bring? How about her as-yet-unresolved relationships with Tom’s mother, with his daughter, Olivia, and with her own children, Eric and Christine. The possibilities are endless. But series do seem to come to a natural conclusion. I hope I have the opportunity to find it.

NTG: What’s next for the series after this book, without any spoilers of course?

Connie Berry: I’m currently working on a possible fifth book in the series, which takes Kate and Tom to rural Devon, where a local history museum has asked them to verify the provenance of a blood-stained Victorian dress, said to have belonged to a lacemaker, suspected of murder. The dress was a gift to the museum from a “historical re-creator,” a man who dresses and lives like a Victorian gentleman. Is the dress what it purports to be, and was there a murder? No one was declared missing, and no body, human or animal, was ever found. So where did the blood come from? The accused woman refused to offer any explanation and died with her secret unrevealed.

NTG: Is there a particular type of story that you haven’t written yet that you’d love to tackle?

Connie Berry: I’ve always wanted to write a historical mystery, and as a matter of fact, I happen to have a new series in development, set in rural Hampshire, England, during the mid-Victorian era. The mid-nineteenth century brought major social and political changes to the UK as factories drew young people away from the farms and into the cities. Trade unions were organized, pitting the working class against the middle-class factory owners. Fortunes were made and lost. With new possibilities for employment emerging, women aspired to greater independence, laying the groundwork for the Suffrage Movement. New technologies and scientific discoveries significantly changed daily life. By 1830, Robert Peel had formed the Metropolitan Police in London. Nine years later, Parliament enabled justices of the peace to establish police forces in each county. In 1856, this became mandatory.
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Against this turbulent backdrop, a woman of means sets out to redeem the lives of talented people who have been overlooked and marginalized by society. Together they solve crimes. Developing a new cast of characters is a challenge and a joy. And the research is great fun.

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Author Connie Berry